General article category
Long, long ago we were playing in a campaign and had a flying ship. We hired troll shock troops. A little more expensive than normal mercenaries, but the extra cost was offset by reduced materiel costs — we didn’t have to pay for parachutes, the trolls would aim when they …
About ten years ago I played in a campaign based on the Warhammer setting. We were operating out of Mordenheim, nominally working for a “Mr. Graf”, a businessman with broad contacts within the community and an almost-explicable amount of wealth because of it. My first character, Jerris the Toolsmith… well, …
Weapon speeds in D&D – expressed as modifiers to initiative rolls – have always bothered me. I was delighted to see them removed in D&D 3.x after having stuck around through AD&D. Real Life In my experience and observation, both of which I will admit are limited but are verified …
This isn’t the announcement I was hoping to post today, I’ve got some more work to do before I’m ready to open the doors on the RPG blog planet. Things are coming along, but I am now looking for more data. Right now I’m pulling from a couple of my …
A question for RPG designers (pro and amateur, whatever): What is the bare minimum core rule set required to get a game off the ground? Assumptions: Characters are already created (half a dozen pregen). Character-specific rules are attached to the character sheet and don’t need to be repeated, spells and …
… I suppose I could have found a way to get a dash in there or something. What’s one more separator in a title? I realized today after Random Encounter Tables: Second Thoughts (Heavy Lifting) went up that the raw percentages might not be so useful overall, but didn’t have …
I had some Second Thoughts about Random Encounter Tables. Erik Tenkar likes using three dice for his random encounter tables because he likes the curve, and planned to have deliberate, potentially large gaps in the table so he could combine the random encounter check (determine whether there is one) and …
After talking about Building Random Encounter Tables a couple days ago, I’ve seen a few suggestions that could improve the results somewhat. Erik Tenkar talks about deliberately leaving blanks in the random encounter table so a single table handles not only the selection of encounter but whether or not there …
I was chatting with Martin Ralya (from Gnome Stew) about building random encounter tables and thought I’d try to capture some of my thoughts here. For a long time I’ve leaned toward simulationism in gaming. I wanted to know why everything was and for it to make sense. As you …
When developing something new, it is often worthwhile to look around and compare to similar things that already exist to make sure you’re not going too far off the rails — or if you are, that it is in a direction you want. In this post I do a rough comparison of my intermediate results with the Greyhawk pantheon to make sure I’m not too far out of line. I’m mildly surprised at what i find.
